willing to return home in
poverty from Russia, that great Russia which is a mine of gold for
artists; he decided to remain and try his luck. For twenty years
the poor German had been trying his luck; he had lived in various
gentlemen's houses, had suffered and put up with much, had faced
privation, had struggled like a fish on the ice; but the idea of
returning to his own country never left him among all the hardships he
endured; it was this dream alone that sustained him. But fate did
not see fit to grant him this last and first happiness: at fifty,
broken-down in health and prematurely aged, he drifted to the town of
O----, and remained there for good, having now lost once for all every
hope of leaving Russia, which he detested. He gained his poor livelihood
somehow by lessons. Lemm's exterior was not prepossessing. He was short
and bent, with crooked shoulders, and contracted chest, with large flat
feet, and bluish white nails on the gnarled bony fingers of his sinewy
red hands. He had a wrinkled face, sunken cheeks, and compressed lips,
which he was for ever twitching and biting; and this, together with his
habitual taciturnity, produced an impression almost sinister. His grey
hair hung in tufts on his low brow; like smouldering embers, his little
set eyes glowed with dull fire. He moved painfully, at every step
swinging his ungainly body forward. Some of his movements recalled the
clumsy actions of an owl in a cage when it feels that it is being looked
at, but itself can hardly see out of its great yellow eyes timorously
and drowsily blinking. Pitiless, prolonged sorrow had laid its indelible
stamp on the poor musician; it had disfigured and deformed his person,
by no means attractive to begin with. But any one who was able to get
over the first impression would have discerned something good, and
honest, and out of the common in this half-shattered creature. A devoted
admirer of Bach and Handel, a master of his art, gifted with a lively
imagination and that boldness of conception which is only vouchsafed to
the German race, Lemm might, in time--who knows?--have taken rank with
the great composers of his fatherland, had his life been different; but
he was born under an unlucky star! He had written much in his life, and
it had not been granted to him to see one of his compositions produced;
he did not know how to set about things in the right way, to gain favour
in the right place, and to make a push at the right momen